Book Review - Australia and the ‘New World Order’: From peacekeeping to peace-enforcement, 1988–1991
Australia and the ‘New World Order’: From peacekeeping to peace-enforcement, 1988–1991,
Written by: David Horner,
Cambridge University Press, 2011,
ISBN 9780521765879, 696 pp
Reviewed by: Kim Beazley
David Horner has a clear-eyed view of the task of an official historian. In his preface to this volume, Australia and the New World Order: From peace-keeping to peace-enforcement: 1988–1991, he argues, ‘an official history is a record of a government’s activities’. It is not military history, diplomatic history, political history or social history in the strictest sense, though its material is invaluable to the other genres. In covering the actions of governments (in this volume, apart from longer perspectives, exclusively the Hawke Government) his analysis is directed at three levels: strategic – largely government decision-making processes, operational – execution by the ADF and agencies of government decisions, and tactical – what service and civilian operatives did in the field.
Horner feels an added burden of responsibility because many of the missions he covers—the peacekeepers in Namibia in 1989–1990, the clearance divers for the tanker war phase of the Iran-Iraq war and observers of its conclusion in 1987–1990, and de-mining experts in Pakistan and Afghanistan 1989–1993—will never have their substantial, sometimes heroic, achievements assessed in any other writing. Their contributions deserve a place in Australia’s voluminous military history. The diplomatic and political skills as well as their military capacities that they brought to complex tasks are worthy of study. The acts of moral courage as well as physical courage frequently demanded of them are overshadowed by the record of massive combat operations in earlier Australian engagements. Even in the case of the much more comprehensively covered Kuwait war, the Australian sailors, clearance divers, medical teams, logistic elements, air transport operatives, intelligence personnel, attached personnel to headquarters and combat elements of allied forces, risk obscurity because our commitment, though tangible, was peripheral to the main effort. They are therefore obscured in mainstream histories. Taking up nearly half the book, as the Kuwait War does, that is not a problem here.
One of the many strengths of this excellent work from the perspective of Australians engaged in the profession of arms is the detail and complexity with which Horner handles the actions of the personnel involved in each engagement. He does not permit their trivialisation and ensures the big picture is drawn out of their seemingly thankless small tasks. For example, the sixty servicemen who served in the long-forgotten UN Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group monitoring the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq War, unarmed in a dangerous and uncooperative environment, ‘filled a mission of presence. While they remained, hostilities were unlikely to resume’.
Since the time period covered in this book, 1988–1991, Australian military personnel of all three services have been continuously engaged abroad in peacekeeping, peace-enforcement, maritime interception and war. Sometimes they have been covered by UN mandate. Sometimes they are there as a result of alliance commitments. Occasionally they have been engaged in response to emergency situations in which Australia had the capacity to act irrespective of broader international cover. It is a surprising outcome of a quiet period of fifteen years after the Australian withdrawal from Vietnam when the focus of Australian defence planning shifted to the self-reliant defence of Australia as our primary military task. As Horner describes, the change emanated from a government whose members, when in opposition, opposed the Vietnam War and were wary of commitments other than in the direct defence of the continent’s approaches.
That caution, moreover, was broadly shared in Australian politics as evidenced by its first official articulation in the Fraser Government’s 1976 Defence White Paper. It was reiterated in the Hawke Government’s 1987 White Paper, Defence of Australia, and a comprehensive military strategy of broad operational and force structure was attached to it. The Hawke Government White Paper anticipated the possibility of involvements outside Australia’s nevertheless generously described area of direct strategic interest (it covered 10 per cent of the earth’s surface, a broader area of strategic concern at 25 per cent). Nevertheless, those of us who had responsibility for drafting the document did not expect it to be tested so soon and so comprehensively.
The expression ‘new world order’, as Horner points out, was first coined by then Soviet Premier Gorbachev in a speech to the United Nations in December 1988. The phrase was used too by Bob Hawke before it became indelibly associated with US President George H W Bush in an address to the US Congress on 16 January 1991 as the air attacks in the Kuwait War began: ‘We have before us the opportunity to forge ... a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.’
The new order reflected a perceived global common interest in becoming the central dynamic of international politics, replacing the bloc alignments of the Cold War. For a brief period of time the founding purposes of the United Nations, commonly agreed principles underpinning collective security, seemed likely at last to flourish. Alliance politics, if not subsumed by UN directions, appeared likely, plausibly, to be moderated through that framework. The missions in this book represented a sharp increase in Australian involvement in UN peacekeeping operations. They also represented a more systematic effort internationally to define the intellectual underpinnings of the notion of peacekeeping to encompass a variety of activities, from observation of the actions of willing partners to a conflict resolution through to armed enforcement against recalcitrants.
Horner is a very good military historian and analyst of higher defence organisation. His reputation will be further enhanced by this book. He has not hitherto been identified with political history. This task obliged him to delve into the arcane world of ALP politics. Throughout he deftly handled the dynamics of ALP factional politics. He comprehends the subtle variations in the perspectives of individual Australian Labor politicians. These include not only the main players in leadership and ministerial positions but also their sometimes more humbly placed antagonists. Horner has to be sensitive to the implications of power struggles between some politicians who might otherwise be in agreement on the basic direction of policy. He works very carefully through the record looking for the relevance of differing philosophies in determining policy outcomes.
After the 1987 White Paper was published, the government found itself rapidly obliged to clarify its understanding of the character of its commitment to the American alliance. This was the consequence of calls from allies to engage Australia in the handling of the ‘tanker war’ component of the war between Iran and Iraq. Despite opposition within its ranks and in the broader community, the government tilted toward the United States in Operation SANDGLASS, the commitment (not taken up) of clearance divers to western organised defence of the Persian Gulf’s sea lanes. Less controversially, the government demonstrated at much the same time its more readily agreed commitment to UN activities. They did this in supporting UNTAG, the supervision of Namibian independence, then the largest overseas deployment of Australian forces since the Vietnam War.
The Kuwait War, ironically, produced the use of the Royal Australian Navy in precisely the conditions identified in the Defence White Paper for using a force structure developed for the defence of Australia further afield. The White Paper had identified the possibility of the commitment of Australian frigates to an American carrier battlegroup. Nevertheless, despite UN approval of this engagement, it induced most internal disputation in the ALP of all the missions Horner analyses. Hawke’s rationale focused heavily on the need to support a UN-endorsed act of collective security. Others in the party discerned an alliance motivation behind the government’s decision. This strengthened the resolve of some while alarming others. The government segued between alliance obligations and strengthening the UN’s hand as it developed its rationale for ‘out of area deployments’. Each step it took to engage in the missions described in this book created precedents on which decisions for future commitments would build, even as the ‘new world order’ passed out of fashion as a concept. The result was a sea-change in Australian foreign and national security policy.
I have only two quibbles with Horner’s analysis. On page 305, he suggests it was the Hawke Government that decided not to include an aircraft carrier in the RAN’s force structure. In fact, the Fraser Government took the decision when the United Kingdom asked to be able to hang on to the HMS Invincible in the aftermath of the Falklands War. The other is that in discussing UNTAG, it might have been useful to have included more on the Hawke Government’s efforts to pressure an end to apartheid in South Africa. This involved major Australian initiatives on sanctions and diplomacy, including the creation of an ‘eminent persons group’. Namibia was seen in part as an element of dismantling the apartheid system, albeit at its periphery. These are quibbles. This is an essential book in a library on Australian national security policy.
